I was searching Google Books for information on military bread ovens in the 19th century, a process my girlfriend refers to as “wooden cowing,” and came across this sketch regarding bread in Italy circa 1894. It was written by Olive May Eager, a minor American writer who lived in Italy and seems to have supported…
Category: Culture of Bread
The Dislike for the Sour Taste in Bread (1903)
LEAVEN is nothing more nor less than flour and water, stirred together and kept in a warm place until fermentation commences. Every time the baker makes bread, a certain quantity should be kept back in an earthen pot for the next sponge. The use of leaven is supposed to have originated in Egypt. It is…
An American Apple Bread circa 1860
A very light pleasant bread is made in France by a mixture of apples and flour, in the proportion of one of the former to two of the latter. The usual quantity of yeast is employed as in making common bread, and is beat with flour and warm pulp of the apples after they have…
Fry Bread
Many Native American tribes have adopted fry bread as their national bread. In this video Naomi Good Shield from the Lakota demonstrates her version of the bread in a thorough well-paced documentary. Note the detail that she does not want it to puff up in a ball, like a pita bread, and so she puts…
English Horse-breads circa 1600 to 1800
Download the PDF to my article in Gastronomica on the breads fed to race horses in England beginning in the 1590s. It turns out that for centuries the most detailed instructions for making bread published in English were written for horses. Gervase Markham, who is well known amongst culinary historians as the author of the…
Manchet Bread from The Good Huswifes Handmaide in the Kitchen (1594)
This one of the earliest and most important English bread recipes. The Good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchen was published in England in 1594. It is one of the first English cookbooks. The anonymous author offers a wide range of recipes, mostly simple, and most reasonably accessible to modern readers. The book includes two
Historic Breads at Plimoth Plantation
Corn (maize) and wheat breads baked at Plimoth Plantation. Plimoth Plantation is a national park. The primary attraction is a reenactment village that is designed to provide a sense of what life was like for the early settlers. The village is frozen in time. It is always 1627 at Plimoth Plantation. By focusing on a…
The Forest of Memory, Rye Bread from Belarus
This is indirectly a story about rye bread from Belarus. When I was in my twenties, which was in the 1970s, I bought a beautiful book on bread called Le Pain. I bought it in a bookshop in Paris. My French is poor but I could get something from the text. There was a mention…
William Rubel 